Society’ that the cultural critic speaks as though he were the representative of an intact nature or of a historically superior state; however, he himself necessarily participates in this entity above which he imagines himself illustriously elevated (Adorno, 1962 [1955]: 9). This doesn’t mean to say that this task consists in watching the use of ideologies,15 but rather that he has to be critical. Consequently, the dialectic critic has to participate and not participate in the ideological aspects. Only in this way will he achieve justice for the idea/thing and for himself (Adorno, 1962 [1955]: 28). Herbert Marcuse, in the preface of the French edition of the OneDimensional Man in 1964, looks at the question in a similar way to Adorno. He emphasizes that the intellectual work needs to be justified increasingly, because whilst the wise may be classified as the inheritors of the working class, they are, however, potential heirs working on a highly theoretical plane. At the same time that they are critics, they benefit from the system that they criticize because they are well paid.16 With the passing of time, Marcuse’s position of disapproval in respect of the relations between theoretical critics and the oppressed was reflected in his position in respect of the same working class as a revolutionary subject.17 Apart from the revision of Marxism, the work programme of the Frankfurt School had included from the outset the study of the psychic structure of individuals – character – within the framework of the more advanced capitalist societies. As has been said, Freud’s work Civilization and Its Discontents was a fundamental reference for the Frankfurt School. In this work, Freud argued that culture originated when primitive man became aware that he could better his destiny through work, and for this he needed collaborators. This discovery is posterior to the existence of the family, whose essential element was the unlimited will of the boss and father. According to Freud, it was only men who could improve their destinies through work. In the totem phase of culture, fraternal alliances were formed with children which gave rise to the first laws in such a way that the shared lives of men acquire a double foundation: on one side, the obligation to work imposed by exterior need; and, on the other, the power of love, which impedes man from giving up his sexual object, woman, and also that part which is separated from her bosom, which is his son (Freud, 1996 [1930]). For Freud, women represent the interests of the family, being scarcely apt for the sublimation of the instincts that culture demands. Women represent the interests of the family and sexual life; cultural work, on the other hand, is increasingly a male task, imposing on men increasing difficulties and obliging them to sublimate their instincts, sublimation for which women are scarcely apt (Freud, 1996 [1930]: 46). Once women are excluded from the civilizing process, Freud presents the problems that this process entails for the male, where culture obeys the empire of economic psychic need and he is seen as obliged to remove a great part of his psychic energy from his sexuality that is needed for his own consumption (Freud,
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